Finished
The Song of the Gladiator by
Paul Doherty, which is listed as 3rd in his Mysteries of Ancient Rome series, although technically this seems to be a loose grouping which lumps in unrelated standalones with novels starring a regular recurring sleuth. In this case, the sleuth is Claudia (in her 2nd novel, according to the blurbs), a servant and secret spy for Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, similar to the setup of Doherty's Alexander the Great mystery series, which I also picked a discount introductory novel for just 99 cents in Headline's sale (still ongoing!).
Also like the previous, there was a combined mystery of the puzzle of the removal of a sacred artifact, as well as a murder case with political implications for the legitimacy of the ruler (and a few other incidental deaths along the way). This close to
reading the Alexander book, that gave a weird sense of déjà-vu, although the plots and motivations do play out differently. I guess it fits in with ancient Roman culture having a thing for Greek copies?
Anyway, like the previous, this was a well-enough done tale in a light casual style which nicely incorporated historical cultural bits and had decent solutions for the assorted mysteries, though personally I didn't find it as engaging* as the ancient Greek one, although I'm quite willing to pick up and look at more. Which is just as well, since I bought a slew of the author's other 99 cent books on sale.
* But then I'm not all that interested in heretical schisms in early Christianity, and there was also what seemed a kind of weird default worldview assumption that even though the sleuth character wasn't actually Christian, she knew more about and paid more attention to Christianity in daily life than whatever other religion she might have practiced (not mentioned, IIRC, except for not being Christianity) and that the surrounding culture was eventually headed for Christianization (which I guess is true in retrospect, but seemed oddly forward-looking coming from a period character living during a time of change) and the historical cultural bits tended to focus on that, too.
That may have been a side-effect of said heretical early Christianity schisms being a plot point in this particular case, but OTOH, I did also get that kind of quasi-proto-Christianity vibe from the
A Murder in Thebes, which starred a Jewish Israelite character as the amateur spy/sleuth and did occasionally make noticeable mention of various things about her faith. So maybe it's just part of the author's style, since he does write mainly medieval mystery series and those tend to have a relatively high degree of cultural background religiosity in them where it isn't quite as noticeable in context.
